Senior Democrats have promised to introduce a bill banning assault weapons as
pressure mounted on Barack Obama to take concrete action to reduce the
likelihood of a repeat of the Sandy Hook primary school massacre.

Local people attend a candlelit vigil to remember the victims of the shooting in Newtown on the Town Hall Green in Stratford, Conn.Photo: AP Photo/The Connecticut Post, Christian Abraham

A bill to restrict the use and sale of weapons like the high-powered Bushmaster .223 that coroners said had killed many of the children at Sandy Hook, would be introduced in the next session of the USCongress, promised senior Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein.

"It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession. Not retroactively but prospectively. And it will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets," she told NBC News, adding that she expected Mr Obama to support the bill.

The move – which would essentially revive the Bill Clinton-era assault weapons that was allowed to lapse in 2004 – is expected to be highly controversial with the powerful gun lobby and politicians whose constituents cling fiercely to their Second Amendment gun rights.

Mr Obama has faced a sharp political dilemma over gun control, almost entirely ducking the issue in his first term because it would cost him votes in the key battleground states – Florida, Virginia, Ohio – which secured his re-election last November, but only by a collective tally of about 250,000 votes.

Chuck Schumer, another senior Democrat senator, said he believed that a deal could be done, but it would require both camps to show flexibility in their previously hard-and-fast attitudes on the subject.

"[The president] cares about these issues, his positions are crystal clear," Mr Schumer said on CBS News, "The problem is the gridlock I've talked about, and no one person – not even the president – can break that." However Mr Obama's support for a revival of the ban is still seen as critical in ensuring that the outrage currently galvanising the gun laws debate is not allowed to dissipate without effect, as it has after countless recent mass shootings.

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, repeated his call that the ineffectual hand-wringing that followed previous mass shootings must not be repeated, arguing that gun reform should be "number one" on the president's agenda.

"If he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns. That is roughly the number of Americans killed in the whole Vietnam War," said Mr Bloomberg, a co-chair of Mayor's Against Illegal Guns.

As an alternative, Joe Lieberman, an independent Senator for Connecticut, called for a national 9/11-style 'commission on mass violence' to find ways to reduce future shootings in the United States, including an assault weapons ban, and circumvent legislative gridlock, but cautioned that there was "no one solution" to the problem.

"We ought to restore the assault weapons ban, not to take anybody's guns away that they have now but to stop the manufacturing of these weapons," he said. "We've got to continue to hear the screams of these children and see their blood until we do something to try and prevent this from happening again." However gun control remains a deeply polarising issue in the United States, with other political figures, including William Bennett, the former Reagan administration education secretary, arguing that the Sandy Hook shootings made the case for more guns, not fewer.

Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, agreed saying that "an open mind" was needed in future negotiations over guns, arguing that if the school's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had been armed the situation could have turned out differently.

"I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office locked up and so when she heard gunshots," he told Fox News, "she takes his head off before he can hurt those kids."